One nation.

One of the big stories in US history is the creation of a nation out of a diverse group of sections—particularly by the convergence of the South on the rest of the country. We know this, at some rough level; the South was rich in the era of slavery1 then poor after the Civil War and then in the middle twentieth century began to look more like the rest of the country.

It would be nice to show it, wouldn’t it?

So these are arranged by state, and color-coded by region. You can see the S shape get shallower, and you can see the South creep up and become better-distributed through the curve, I think.

The figures here come from Kris James Mitchener and Ian W. McLean’s work on “The Productivity of US States since 1880”, Journal of Economic Growth 8 (2003): 73-114. Mitchener and McLean have price indices for each state, to create figures that are comparable across states for price-adjusted income per worker. To render the figures comparable over time, I divided each by the mean for the given year. So you’re seeing the degree of divergence represented here, not actual dollar figures for earnings.

1The extent to which this was true of course should remind us that the wealth of a region may mean the wealth of only a few people in that region.

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Do you know how long the census has used those regions? I suppose the best argument for Delaware as the South is the Mason-Dixon line itself, below which most of the state falls. But at least post-Civil War, Delaware has never been particularly Southern in its politics or (as your graphs nicely show) economy.

JPool — as I tried to indicate in the post, the measure of productivity is price-adjusted income per worker. To render the figures comparable over time, I divided each by the mean for the given year. So what you’re seeing is the share of the mean in the given year.

No, I don’t. And yes, it’s arbitrary. For c19 history, I use other divisions — e.g., South=states that seceded; or, to talk about the new Western states, restrict it to states admitted after the Civil War. Basically, you generally have to pick your own arbitrary definition and justify it. For this purpose, I used the Census regions. You can argue DE doesn’t belong in the South, but then, we’re not looking at a regression line here and DE isn’t the only “southern” state that moves up.

The top third of the state, which contains most of the people, is above the Mason-Dixon line and culturally clearly Mid-Atlantic (we make a decent cheesesteak). The bottom two-thirds, not-so-affectionately known as “Slower Delaware”, is more Southern.

I’m not sure if I’m reading the graphs correctly but if I am it seems that the south never fully recovered from the ante-bellum period. I actually predict things will look up for those states what with the research triangles and elite universities and cheap housing in the south these days.

Thanks for the caveat/footnote at the bottom of the post. Wealth distribution is important, I think, in assessing profit margins and the accumulation of capital. More importantly, for slavery as an economic institution (?), placing the subject in a comparative context (i.e., antebellum “productivity” in northern vs. southern states) is essential in determining “profit.”

Peeps ascribe meanings to implicit contentions, such as “slavery was economically efficient.” The above footnote diminishes the frequency of such meanings.

Because Arizona is the third highest western state in the first graph when it’s not even a state.

Yeah, but what this shows, as teofilo notes, is the impact of mining.

You have two big stories — the West comes down, and the South goes up. The West coming down is actually easier to explain, and easier to accomplish — once your big mining strikes fade, you begin to have more normal circumstances.

I feel like these graphs would be more informative as a group, if perhaps not individually, if the states were in the same order in each.

Well, it depends what you want to do. I want to use these graphs in a presentation before a classroom, so I want people to be able to see the big pattern quite clearly. So the increasingly steep “S” — that’s a visible story.

Eyeballing the graphs it looks like most of the catching up happens between 1940 & 1960, with lesser but significant amount in 1920-1940, and with a persistently steep S shape before that. So can the New Deal/WWII fiscal stimulus take credit for the improvement of the South’s fortunes?

According to Wikipedia: The median household income by state ranged from $36,338 or 28% below national median, in Mississippi to $68,080 or 36% above national median in Maryland. That’s a somewhat apples to oranges to your data, but that suggests that the S of your graph keeps the same shape after 1960 and doesn’t get any shallower.

So it looks like a poor region catching up to more developed ones is something unusual. Here’s my favorite map overlapping an old pattern and a current economic division: An Imperial Palimpsest on Poland’s Electoral Map, or the Polish railways map, which show the old border between pre-WWI German and Russian empires still dividing Poland into 2 regions of different economic development.

So can the New Deal/WWII fiscal stimulus take credit for the improvement of the South’s fortunes?

Many historians / economists do think so, yes. Or if not “fiscal stimulus”, then ND development programs — TVA, road-building, &c.

OTOH there is also a lot of migration going on in this period that may have something to do with it too.

the S of your graph keeps the same shape after 1960 and doesn’t get any shallower.

That’s entirely likely. I mean, we’re looking here at relative catching-up — fully caught up doesn’t happen on these data and maybe not ever. Still, relative convergence is an important event and worth observing.

I’d also suggest Cold War Era movement of DOD organizations and related industries from the West Coast, Mid-Atlantic, Great Lakes, and New England states to the Southeast and Gulf Coast, along with manufacturing generally, as having a large impact.

Shipbuilding is a prime example; aircraft manufacturing/assembly as well, and LBJ’s decisions regarding the location of NASA’s major post-1961 facilities.

I’d suggest removal (or, at least, drastic weakening) of the violent repression of a large segment of the population, which is not only destructive and costly in itself, but also squanders human capital. All the post-Civil War numbers will include the *whole* population in the denominator, including the ones who weren’t allowed to do anything particularly economically productive on pain of vandalism and murder.

Furthermore, anyone sufficiently intelligent and driven to, say, start a successful business who is born into those conditions will probably be more likely to move away, creating a brain drain.

The South was holding *itself* down for a century after the Civil War and blaming outsiders because it’s always easier to blame outsiders.

P.S. I also thought it was odd to include DE and OK in the South. MD and WV stayed in the Union, so if you’re looking at/for something specific to the Civil War, you probably shouldn’t include them, but in other respects they seem to fit.

I’d suggest removal (or, at least, drastic weakening) of the violent repression of a large segment of the population, which is not only destructive and costly in itself, but also squanders human capital.

The graphs show that the South finished catching up by 1960, which still in the Jim Crow era.

As an adoptive Sooner, Oklahoma seems reasonably Southern to me. Politically, economically, and culturally it’s as much a part of the South as Texas is. As for the Civil War, while Oklahoma did not yet exist (even as a territory) a majority of each of the Five Civilized Tribes supported the Confederacy.

I’m actually fascinated with the regional identity of Oklahoma. Most Oklahomans would describe the state as “southwestern.” It does share some cultural and economic characteristics with both the Midwest and the West. Politically it’s very like the South….except it has a much smaller African American population. That’s kept white OK voters longer in the Democratic Party, but it has also made the state even more conservative. While Dems outnumber Republicans in registration by double-digit percentage points, in national elections Oklahoma votes more Republican than any other state but Utah.

It would have been a little difficult for the South to pull itself up by the bootstraps, considering the railroad, manufacturing, and agricultural infrastructure of the entire region were systematically destroyed in detail as a matter of policy during Mr. Lincoln’s war. The “squandered human capital” of that unnecessary slaughter also included the the leading men of the region (the ones who knew how to raise capital, build mills, run railroads, etc. etc.), killed resisting that invasion. And yet you also dismiss the labors of erstwhile slaves who spit in the face of the racism of the times, starting universities, establishing a thriving middle class, and sometimes earning fortunes through entrepreneurship as being “not particularly economically productive?”

There is a third dimension called “depth.” You might wish to explore it when playing with cardboard cutouts get boring.

The 1861-1865 war was emphatically NOT a holy war to end slavery, no matter how shrilly Doris Kearns Goodwin maintains that it was. I agree slavery was wrong, morally and economically, if those two can be separated. It’s interesting to note the draft in effect in the Union states– the practice of involuntary servitude was crushed by an Army of involuntary servants!

I don’t think Mr. Roosevelt’s socialist schemes were the cause of the South’s economic re-invigoration. Consider that capital moves where labor is cheap. In 1910, mill owners moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina; low taxes, cheap land, tractable labor. In the 1980’s, they moved from North Carolina to Asia and Mexico: low taxes, cheap land, tractable labor. Even today, witness the Big 3 and their bloated unions going down, but Toyota and BMW seem to be doing just fine with their factories in Southern “right to work” states. It’s simply easier to do business in the South, so that’s where the money’s moving. Not to mention you don’t have to live through a nasty Michigan winter.